Thursday, December 17, 2009

Free after being wrongly imprisoned for 35 years

Stories like this wrench my heart.

James Bain used a cell phone for the first time Thursday, calling his elderly mother to tell her he had been freed after 35 years behind bars for a crime he did not commit.

Mobile devices didn't exist in 1974, the year he was sentenced to life in prison for kidnapping a 9-year-old boy and raping him in a nearby field.

Neither did the sophisticated DNA testing that officials more recently used to determine he could not have been the rapist.


I'm very much a tough-on-crime type, as well as a supporter of capital punishment. So, in the interests of justice, I warmly support projects that result in freeing wrongly convicted people. The Innocence Project is perhaps the best known one.

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